Me and Orson Welles

 

Director Richard Linklater

Linklater on the set with Zac Efron and Richard McKay

Author Robert Kaplow

Arthur Anderson and Orson Welles in Julius Caesar, 1937

ME AND ORSON WELLES                        B+                                                                          USA  Great Britain  (114 mi)  2008  ‘Scope  d: Richard Linklater

“How the hell do I top this?”   —Orson Welles (Christian McKay)

Richard Linklater movies tend to have a modernist bent to them, where you can feel at times as if you’re lost in a minefield of existential drift.  But that is certainly not the case here in what amounts to a charming and thoroughly enjoyable piece of historical nostalgia, set in 1937 when Orson Welles was attempting to open his Mercury Theater production with a performance of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, a heavily cut, empty-staged yet daring, politically-charged stage adaptation set in Mussolini’s fascist Italy, with Welles playing the part of Brutus.  Linklater is a sincere admirer of Welles, calling him the patron saint of independent filmmakers.  With wall-to-wall jazz music and a typewriter style opening title sequence, one would swear we are about to witness a Woody Allen movie, but we are soon introduced to a strange new world, all led by the larger-than-life persona of the young 22-year old Welles who has yet to make a single movie and is full of swagger and theatrical bluster.  The brilliant performance by British actor Christian McKay, an alumnus of the Royal Shakespeare Company who was discovered when he played Welles in a one-man play, Rosebud: The Lives of Orson Welles, on a small stage in London, just nails the all-too-perfect speech intonations and sardonic facial expressions of Welles, a young genius child prodigy who has yet to take the world by storm.  Alongside Richard Seymour Hoffman as Truman Capote in Bennett Miller’s CAPOTE (2005), this is one of the great biographical film performances, though completely ignored by the Academy, where Welles’ blustery self-assurance and bullying sarcastic wit are on full display, obviously a man on a mission who is just getting his first taste of his own powers, literally browbeating his cast into submission, refusing to accept anyone else’s way except his own, quickly showing them the door if they refuse, so everyone defers to his judgment.  After all, he takes credit for every idea, even Shakespeare’s, calling it an Orson Welles production of Shakespeare, where he gets top billing, deleting characters and scenes on a whim whenever the mood suits him, but also making everyone feel that despite the fact they are receiving no salary, they are just a few days away from being a part of theater history. 

Interesting that this is the very first Shakespeare performance on Broadway, ever, where Welles is like a traveling road show that rolls in and out of town, driven by the breeze of destiny, yet the “Me” of the title concerns a small bit player, a coming-of-age 17-year old New Jersey high school student Richard (teen idol Zac Efron, working outside his comfort zone), who dreams of becoming an actor, skipping school, wandering downtown, and happening by chance to see Welles on the street in front of the theater, playing up to his enormous ego, all lies and pretense, but he wins a role as the charming, lute-strumming (it’s actually a ukulele) Lucius in the modern-dress revival of the play which is opening in a week.  Adapted by a husband and wife team of Holly Gent Palmo and Vincent Palmo Jr. based upon a New York Times best-selling, meticulously researched historical novel by Robert Kaplow, a writer and New Jersey high school English teacher who was inspired by an archival photograph of a young 15-year old actor (Arthur Anderson) strumming the lute next to Welles onstage, imagining just what he must have been thinking at the time.  Linklater cleverly mixes fact and fiction in this portrait of the artist as a young man, as the film is limited to this memorable week of rehearsals, providing a window into the world of theater, showing the passionate camaraderie of those weary participants, very attentive to period detail, revealing behind-the-scenes vignettes of the principal players, but especially Welles who dominates every scene, as even when the cast sits around doing nothing, “We’re waiting for Orson,” his aura remains evident at all times.  To learn his part, Richard is referred to Sonja (Claire Danes), the all-purpose, exceedingly ambitious personal assistant who is likely already sleeping with Welles (along with pretty much every other female), who has promised her a chance to meet David O. Selznick and an opportunity to play in GONE WITH THE WIND (1939).  Discovering her last name is Jones, Richard serenades her with a line from Rodgers and Hart, Have You Met Miss Jones?, which might actually have spawned the director’s later interest in making Blue Moon (2025). Thoroughly flirtatious, leading to grownup sex, the two become fast friends, which they remain throughout the film, though she trusts Richard simply because he has no clout, so she can be open and honest with him, guiding him through the egos and everyday disasters that take place each day on the set. 

Recalling the immersive nature of Cameron Crowe’s ALMOST FAMOUS (2000), with an observant young teenage reporter surrounded by a brave new world of rock ‘n’ roll, Efron is not very good in the play, but that hardly matters, as he’s playing a young novice who’s not supposed to be very good, so he fits comfortably into the production, enthralled by the world around him, which features excellent performances all around.  In perhaps the film’s best scene, Welles whisks “the kid” into a cab with him on route to the radio studio where he observes Welles perform a skit on a live radio broadcast, but along the way Welles drops his guard and reads him a passage from Booth Tarkington’s novel The Magnificent Ambersons, where he mourns that “Ambersons is about how everything gets taken away from you,” a stunning personal admission considering the Hollywood brass did exactly that to his career just a few short years later, destroying his original ending on The Magnificent Ambersons (1942) and effectively ending his Hollywood career.  When Welles ad-libs an Ambersons passage on the radio, adding a delicious soliloquy for himself, he’s profoundly seeing his career years ahead of himself.  Outside of Welles, James Tupper is absolutely brilliant as the suave and ever cordial James Cotton, the man behind the scenes of so many of Welles’ successes, Ben Chaplin plays an anxiety-ridden leading man George Coulouris, quickly whisking his mistress offstage when his wife arrives, Eddie Marsan plays the constantly perplexed theater manager and old friend, John Houseman, while Zoe Kazan (Elia Kazan’s granddaughter) plays Gretta, an aspiring young writer Richard befriends, helping her get published in The New Yorker.   While Richard is quickly informed by Sonja of his status, “You’re not getting anything except the opportunity to be sprayed by Orson’s spit,” Orson has a habit of initially bolstering each actor’s confidence with flowery praise, such as seeing “images of magnificence” in their eyes before bringing them back down to earth with his rapid fire rounds of terse criticism.  Thankfully, Linklater does show various scenes from the theatrical premiere, all of which feel like a special treat, so the audience is rewarded and never for a moment feels cheated in this film.   

While the film was a box office bomb, premiering in Toronto after select footage was screened at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival, and not released in the U.S. until a year later, this is something completely different for Linklater, yet it’s essential filmmaking, upbeat and thoroughly enjoyable, like a light at the end of the tunnel following the dark times of the Depression, beautifully extolling the glories and virtues of still being young, filled with idealistic hope and promise, with the film suggesting, “it’s all ahead of us.”  Offering an ambitious, behind-the-scenes glimpse of a theater production in the making, this spirited film always feels balanced, intelligent and amusing, filled with an unbridled wit and humor, along with a select few poor souls who unfortunately feel the ignominious wrath of an undeterred mad hatter in charge, yet the focus doesn’t always swirl around Orson Welles, the man who commands the salacious interest in every scene, where it’s hard to take your eyes off such a brilliant rendering of his overwhelming personality.  Instead, the week’s events are seen and filtered through the somewhat bland eyes (think Tab Hunter) of the young thespian who’s still taking classes in high school (actually found sleeping in class, due to his late night carousing), an idealistic, wide-eyed everyman character, just a few years younger than Welles himself, who instantly falls in love with Sonja, and whose life is forever altered by this experience.  Beautifully shot in London, New York, and the Isle of Man by Mike Leigh’s superb cinematographer Dick Pope, the film benefits from some plot twists, capturing the essence of Welles as a rising star and the beginning of the Welles legend, exhaustively researched, with a very beautiful reconstruction of the post-depression era of the 1930’s, a period where art and culture merged together.  Perhaps not up to the caliber of Cassavetes’ brilliant Opening Night (1977), or Chaplin’s LIMELIGHT (1952), both the ultimate masterworks in revealing the wrenching behind-the-scenes activities of a stage production, or even Desplechin’s delightfully offbeat ESTHER KAHN (2000), this film is nonetheless fueled by the supercharged performance of a young, unheralded actor who perfectly captures the indomitable spirit of Orson Welles, a legendary, larger-than-life figure who is one of America’s greatest and most controversial artists.   

Blue Moon

 

Director Richard Linklater

Linklater on the set

actor Ethan Hawke

Lorenz Hart/Ethan Hawke

Richard Rodgers/Andrew Scott

BLUE MOON            B                                                                                                             USA  Ireland  (100 mi)  2025  d: Richard Linklater

It’s like, well, perhaps a Rodgers and Hart song, kind of beautiful and super sad and forlorn and all those things too.  A catchy tune where you’re devastated by the end.                              —Richard Linklater describing his film

While the film doesn’t have the romantic scope of his Before Trilogy, Before Sunrise (1995), Before Sunset (2004), and Before Midnight (2013), where the first two are among the best romantic love stories of the modern era, thriving on the spontaneity of the moment, he’s also made films like Dazed and Confused (1993), 2014 Top Ten List #1 Boyhood, or even Everybody Wants Some !! (2016), which feel like anthems to childhood, as well as the mind-bogglingly funny Hit Man (2023), yet this is something different altogether, with Linklater releasing two films at the same time, an ode to the French New Wave from Godard’s Breathless (À Bout de Souffle) (1960) in Nouvelle Vague, and this 1940’s tribute to songwriter/lyricist Lorenz Hart.  Working again with Ethan Hawke for the first time since the Before Trilogy in what is essentially an elegiac character study in a film about art, artists, and meaning, this is a chamber drama revealing the dark sides of success, a biographical drama that focuses on a crucial night in Hart’s life, where what stands out is the heavily staged theatricality, with nearly the entire film taking place in real time at one location, a national landmark in Sardi’s restaurant, a historical spot in the heart of New York’s theater district, considered the toast of Broadway for more than 100 years.  Yet that’s simply the backdrop for what amounts to a non-stop, heavily-scripted discourse out of the mouth of lyricist Lorenz Hart (Ethan Hawke, nearly unrecognizable with a slick comb-over), a tortured artist who is deeply hurt by what he views as a betrayal from his longtime partner and friend, Richard Rogers (Andrew Scott), among the best composers of American musical theater, who decided instead to work with a different writing partner, Oscar Hammerstein (Simon Delaney), and lo and behold they turn out the biggest hit of Rogers’ career in Oklahoma!, a kitschy portrait of Americana that completely revolutionized musical theater in the early 1940’s by integrating songs, dances, and plot.  For Hart this is tragic, as he hates the musical they’ve created, pandering wholesomeness to overly white audiences, creating a completely inaccurate and inauthentic portrait of America, missing the humanity of the human soul, but the upbeat songs are catchy and audiences seem to love it.  Hart leaves the theater early and wanders into a nearly empty Sardi’s restaurant before the theater crowd comes crashing in, where this is a very dialogue-heavy work, as the camera remains almost exclusively in the bar, and the plot is driven by sprawling conversations and monologues that thematically jump back and forth with the bartender Eddie (Bobby Cannavale) and lounge player “Knuckles” (Jonah Lees) clinking on the piano, whose musical selections often compliment whatever the hell Hart is babbling about, beautifully evoking the era of the 1940’s.  That pretty much defines the picture, as the closeted gay Hart is a chatty Cathy, as they say, as he philosophizes and mocks, blasphemes and complains, lectures and analyzes, while catching the attention of whoever is sitting within earshot, told in a frenetic, screwball-comedy pace, where the entire film captures his every syllable, where he just goes on endlessly about everything under the sun to whoever is willing to listen, raising profound questions about the nature of art, the price of success, and the transience of fame.  But viewers may space out after a while, finding a bitterly exposed Hart a bit too much, while it can also become tedious and repetitious, with witty yet heavy-handed dialogue that doesn’t have the naturalness and light-as-a-feather airiness of a Linklater-written script, which makes all the difference in the world, and can instead feel forced down our throats, with few, if any, pauses to offer a moment of relief.  While there have been other successful musical biopics, like Mike Leigh’s TOPSY-TURVY (1999), Taylor Hackford’s RAY (2004), James Mangold’s A Complete Unknown (2024), and Reinaldo Marcus Green’s Bob Marley: One Love (2024), this feels more like a one-man play, with the suffocating presence of Hart onscreen for nearly every shot.  Linklater doesn’t sanitize Hart’s addiction or despair, yet never loses sight of the brilliance behind his pain, as snippets of his songs drift through scenes like ghosts, reminders that even as Hart’s life crumbled, his words have endured.

If Hart ever imagined his life as a stage play, hurling words like thunderbolts, or exploding bombs, then the rest of the cast are just silent extras.  Often feeling like we’re in the middle of a Woody Allen movie, packed with textual cross-references, self-deprecating jokes, and sardonic commentaries, and just a touch of self-reflection, with wall-to-wall piano music of American standards and screwball comedy dialogue spewed fast and furiously, Hart is an alcoholic plagued by self-doubt, yet is recently sober, attempting to retrieve the essential purpose of his life that he feels has been dumped on the curb, already considered a has-been, as Rogers has found himself another successful partner, who’s much easier to deal with, by the way, making him the odd man out.  Nonetheless, whether he’s raving about the best line in the movie Ingrid Bergman Tribute: Casablanca (1942), Bogart’s “Nobody ever loved me that much,” another wartime film about two men and a girl, sharing many of the same thematic connections of a bar, friendship, dashed hopes, and a melancholy finale where the protagonist is left behind, or whether anyone else knows just how terrible Oklahoma! is, with its ridiculous use of an exclamation point to draw attention to itself, Hart is a force of nature waxing eloquently about the unequivocal allure of Elizabeth (Margaret Qualley as a blond, a baffling choice, since she’s a decade older), a Yale art student who just turned 20, hoping for a career as a production designer.  After months of correspondence and a mysteriously beautiful (for him) yet unconsummated weekend, he believes this may be the night to finally win her love, where he’s planning a grand soirée afterwards, hiring a string quartet, and even inviting the delivery boy in what he promises will be a memorable evening.  Eddie is confused (as are we), believing Hart prefers the company of men, but Hart defies all expectations, claiming he is “omnisexual,” with the film all but ignoring any hidden homoerotic tension, which CASABLANCA was filled with, by the way, if you believe Hart.  For a gay figure, the film strangely and mysteriously devotes a considerable amount of time to a heterosexual relationship, which may reflect the depths of his own existential loneliness.  Describing Elizabeth as his protégée and muse, suggesting she’s too sexy and smart for boys her own age, he goes on a rhapsodic rant about how much she means to him, suggesting it might be love, despite their age difference.  It sounds like a pipe dream, one of those long-winded alcoholic excursions of prosaic virtuosity in Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, as Hart is a man who wears his heart on his sleeve, where his alcohol-fueled tirades are a mask for his deeply repressed insecurities, basically an open book for anyone to read, yet reality rarely lives up to those long suppressed hopes, which are so easily dashed in an instant.  Off in a corner he spots E.B. White (Patrick Kennedy), a fellow writer who also has a clever and witty way with words, where their dialogue together is an endless stream of carefully calculated phrases where every word is aptly grandiose, filled with underlying meaning, as the two effortlessly hit it off.  Nonetheless, Hart singlehandedly holds court for the first half of the film, sneaking a shot of bourbon every now and then to bolster his courage, tossing off philosophical maxims like “How can you give voice to the whole world if you don’t have the whole world inside of you?,” gearing up to meet the eye of the storm when all the theater well-wishers show up in an entourage surrounding Richard Rogers, all offering unanimous praise, claiming it’s the greatest musical of all time, with Hart forced to offer his own disingenuous congratulations in this chorus of effusive praise.  Probably the weakest aspect of the film is the digital cinematography by Shane F. Kelly, a Linklater regular since A SCANNER DARKLY (2006), but it lacks spatial depth, never really capturing the claustrophobic, closed-in feeling of the room, often having the artificial staginess of a filmed play.  

Having worked together for more than 20 years from the 20’s to the 40’s, writing 28 stage musicals together, along with over 500 songs, Rogers can see through Hart’s obvious disdain for Oklahoma!, yet he’s willing to set that aside in the interest of being magnanimous, having put up with all of Hart’s emotionally insecure mood swings and alcoholic doldrums for all those years, where he was simply a pain in the ass to work with, always flying off the handle, something of a drama queen grabbing all the attention, while he was left with doing the hard work.  Nonetheless, he offers him a chance to write a few new songs for a revival of A Connecticut Yankee, their successful musical from 1927, but Hart is more interested in his delirious idea about creating a grand musical spectacle around adventurer Marco Polo, which sounds like an exotic journey into the strange and undiscovered lands of King Kong (1933), filled with the same kind of extravagance.  “It’s the thrill of a lifetime,” which he believes is infinitely more interesting than the homogenized and overly predictable Oklahoma!  “Who wants inoffensive art?” he exclaims at one point, but the war years may have taken a toll, with a weary nation preferring something more safe and conventional.  While the ever-eccentric Hart is stealing his limelight, Rogers calmly returns to his party of well-wishers, reminding him to think about the new songs.  While Ethan Hawke’s deliberately showy performance of Hart is the centerpiece of the film, breathing life into the role, something should be said for the saintly grace shown by Rogers (Scott won the Best Supporting Actor Award at the Berlin Film Festival), and the endless patience on display, shown through a myriad of changing facial expressions, where it’s clear their paths are on different trajectories, as he looks so effortlessly polite in such an obviously uncomfortable situation, moving his way upstairs to an afterparty that leaves Hart behind.  As an aside, Hart also meets a young Hammerstein prodigy dressed in a tuxedo named Stephen (Cillian Sullivan), a foreshadowing reference to Stephen Sondheim, who would go on to redefine Broadway musicals with his virtuosic wordplay while also introducing darker themes, becoming theater's most revered and influential composer-lyricist of the last half of the 20th century, and just happens to be the subject of Linklater’s next project, MERRILY WE ROLL ALONG, which will be filmed over the course of the next 20 years, with actors aging naturally, not to be confused by the upcoming holiday release by the same name.  By the time Elizabeth shows up, Hart is all aflutter, his nerves on edge, yet his manners are impeccable, as he curiously gives her all of the attention, wanting to hear everything since they last met, as he’s all ears, literally hanging on every word.  While she’s flattered by his near-obsessional infatuation, coming from a man who is more than twice her age, she makes it clear her interest is “not in that way.”  Perhaps the title of the film says it all, as this is not some sunny remembrance, but is instead a collision course between the high-wire act of being a celebrated artist who may already be on a downward spiral, but just doesn’t realize that yet, and the inescapable success of his ex-partner, who along with Oscar Hammerstein would go on to become the greatest writing team in American musical history, leaving Hart behind as yesterday’s news.  It’s a savagely despairing story written by Robert Kaplow, whose novel was the source material for Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles (2008), adapting the material from Hart’s letters that he wrote to an unidentified woman named Elizabeth, which Kaplow bought at an estate sale, accentuating the ups and downs that occur in the ever-evolving life of a melancholic artist, becoming a mournful tale of a man whose career was cut too short, with Ethan Hawke capturing the contradictions of his character, where everything is secondary to his performance, whose heightened mood swings have a profoundly dark emotional impact. Described at the beginning of the movie as “the saddest man I ever knew,” one of three quotations from companions who draw a picture of a sociable but devastatingly lonely person, within seven months Hart would drunkenly collapse in a rain-soaked back alley and die (which is actually the opening sequence, with a radio broadcast obituary playing over it), with Linklater deserving credit for generously reviving his spirit in this Irish wake-like, tragicomic sendoff, where, perhaps coincidentally, the film was actually shot in Ireland, specifically in and around Dublin, recalling, of course, John Huston’s The Dead (1987).